Even as you read this, a terror cell is probably planning to target a Premier League game or the NFL's Monday Night Football in the United States. Once you face up to that reality, then it's easy to see why the Indian Premier League won't be moved out of India this year. There are some who'll argue that the switch to South Africa last April set something of a precedent. It didn't. That temporary exile was prompted by the government's refusal to spare the security personnel deputed to ensure that India could go to the polls without the spectre of terror looming over the ballot box.

If you look at the advertising promos for the third season of the IPL which starts on 12 March, the emphasis is very much on the Indianness of the event. Sure, Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist and Kumar Sangakkara lend some international flavour, but the tagline – Saare jahaan se achcha (Better than the entire world), written ironically enough by Muhammad Iqbal, who later became a proponent of the two-nation theory and Pakistan's national poet – is an uber-patriotic version of Tina Turner's Simply the Best, used to promote everything from HBO to Australian rugby league.

It's become fashionable with some to stick pins into Lalit Modi's voodoo doll at every opportunity, but the stance that he has taken regarding the relocation (or not) of games is perfectly reasonable. Reg Dickason, security adviser to the England team, has warned of a "credible" threat from the 313 Brigade in Pakistan. Their very choice of name reveals them to be ignorant apostates. No true cricket-lover would choose Younis Khan's 313, made at the National Stadium in Karachi two weeks before the attack on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore, over Hanif Mohammad's epic 337 or Inzamam-ul-Haq's 329.

Do we seriously expect Modi or other sports administrators to go weak at the knees each time some obscure terror group decides to exercise the speed-dial option? India has the Commonwealth Games to host in October and a cricket World Cup final next March. Admission of any inability to secure the IPL would be tantamount to saying that those events should be moved as well. After all, how many Commonwealth athletes, Usain Bolt apart, are as renowned as a Warne or Sachin Tendulkar?

For decades, sportsmen, journalists and fans alike consoled themselves with the thought that cricket and other sports would be immune to terror. We should have known better. Jamaicans love their reggae and revere Bob Marley, but if you go to 56 Hope Road in Kingston, you can still see the bullet holes in the plaster from an assassination attempt in December 1976. In the aftermath of Lahore, the constant refrain from players was: "We didn't think it would happen to us."

Now that the imaginary magic shield is gone, players must be left to make their own decisions. For every Ricky Ponting who's wary of players journeying to India, there will be someone else like Warne or Matthew Hayden who's convinced that the high levels of security promised by Modi and the organisers are adequate. It's easy to label one group cowards and the other mercenaries. The reality is far more complex.

Threat perceptions vary from individual to individual. I've watched football inside a Turkish stadium without being stabbed and wandered the illegal gun markets of Peshawar unharmed. However, I draw the line at watching Shah Rukh Khan play the poor man's Sean Penn in a multiplex. If Hayden decides that there's decent fly-fishing to be had on the Coromandel coast, fair play to him. If someone else decides that it's too risky to leave a young family behind and journey to Jaipur, scene of a bomb blast during the IPL in 2008, then I respect that too.

You only have to look at the number of politicians and public figures that have fallen foul of an assassin's bullet or bombs to know that perfect security is a pipedream. Even Scotland Yard couldn't protect the Conservative party from the IRA in Brighton a quarter of a century ago. The IPL may be a private league, the plaything of rich men if you believe the cynics, but it's not in India's interest to see it disrupted.

Bill Shankly was half-right when he spoke of football being "much more important" than life and death. Perhaps in no other sphere of human endeavour are the emotions so heightened and even magnified. Would John Terry and Ashley Cole be under the tabloid microscope now if they were merely sleazy businessmen? Why do grown men weep in front of the Munich and Hillsborough memorials, while remaining largely indifferent to candlelit vigils for 11 September or 26 November?

If Modi and friends gave in to the jihadi desparadoes or to some cartoonist-turned-right-wing-loon who doesn't want Australian players in Mumbai, it would be the final indignity, weary resigned acceptance that we all dance to terror's tune. The choice is for each of us to make. We can either be bullied into submission and cower behind the sofa, or we can head to the stadiums and claim our lives back.

I'll be in Mumbai on 12 March, taking my seat as the Deccan Chargers start their defence of the IPL trophy. As for the deluded nincompoops of the 313 Brigade, hopefully someone will disabuse them of the notion that 72 virgins await if they blow themselves to smithereens. Heaven is right here on Earth. I would know. I've watched VVS Laxman bat.

• This article was amended on 25 February 2010. The original identified Reg Dickason as security adviser to the Indian team. This has been corrected.